Author Archives: erhubbell
The importance of hobbies
Chapter Six: Exaptation of Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From looks at how, both biologically and in human invention, new ideas are often modified, tinkered old ideas. In evolutionary terms, birds’ feathers are an exaptation of what initially served to keep the animal warm. In human invention terms, many new ideas are modified from a previous and well-known invention (e.g. Guttenberg’s printing press from a wine press, Babbage’s computer punch cards from Jacquard’s weaving punch cards).
Many of the inventors in Johnson’s examples had the commonality of areas of interest outside of their chosen profession that complemented and expanded their thinking. I’ve always felt a twinge of guilt at having interests outside of education, with my inner voice sometimes chiding, “if you were really serious about education, you wouldn’t spend so much time decorating, learning new cooking techniques, collecting American silver, golfing….”
I dismissed that voice by justifying that people need “off” time for good mental health, but I had not considered the perspective of needing these hobbies to inform my chosen profession. I’m still struggling with this idea.
Questions for Reflection:
- Can you think of a time when one of your interests outside of education informed or inspired your work in education?
- In the workplace, how can we make each other aware of these outside interests to encourage creative discussions and collaboration?
Fail faster
Chapter 5: Error of Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From told story after story of how some of our greatest inventions and discoveries were a direct result of a mistake (e.g. vulcanized rubber, penicillin). While I understand that we, especially in the field of education, are trying our hardest to STOP making and repeating mistakes that negatively impact learning, I also think it’s a mistake to put teachers into such a sterile, lock-step environment that there is no room for innovation. Two quotes from this chapter get at the heart, I think, of the message:
“Innovative environments thrive on useful mistakes, and suffer when the demands of quality control overwhelm them.” (Location 1689)
“Big organizations like to follow perfectionist regimes like Six Sigma and Total Quality Management, entire systems devoted to eliminating error from the conference room or the assembly line, but it’s no accident that one of the mantras of the Web startup world is fail faster.” (Location 1690) (Italics and bold are my own.)
My questions for reflection:
- How do we incorporate unprecedented access to data, research, and information to improve education while still allowing dedicated, connected, passionate teachers the flexibility to discover what works for their students?
- How do we allow educational leaders the freedom to “fail faster” in safe, but informative and reflective environments so that they can eventually arrive at the right solutions?
Cultivating the “ah-ha” moments
Chapter Four: Serendipity of Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From really got into how organizations can create environments that maximize the potential for “ah-ha” moments. This chapter gave me several ideas that I would love to explore at a future gathering with colleagues. While the author described several ways of encouraging serendipity, my biggest take-aways were:
- Take a walk. Sitting at a desk isn’t always the most inspiring setting. When looking for solutions or new ideas, take a walk, breathe fresh air, relax your brain…this is often when inspiration can hit.
- Create a system for cultivating articles, quotes, etc. that you find interesting. Learn to tag them for ease in aggregating them later. I use Google Reader, Diigo, and Pinterest for these purposes. Many people I know use Evernote.
- Create opportunities for serendipitous learning: read things outside your profession. Find ways that force you to stumble upon stories or information that you might not have otherwise. I love this one simple quote around this idea: ”Filters reduce serendipity.” (Location1352) In other words, if I only read ed tech blogs, follow ed tech Tweeters, and read ed tech books, my vision is going to be very limited. I need to find ways out of the echo chamber.
- Create a “hunch database” where employees can peruse ideas of co-workers and add their own. I find this idea most intriguing, yet most challenging for implementing. We have a paper-based model of this in our break room, but that isn’t visited as often as we would hope. What would be an effective, efficient hunch-database for our employees?
Perhaps I need to take a walk…
The Learning Edge by Bain & Weston (Summary 8 of 8)
I am currently reading The Learning Edge: What Technology Can Do to Educate All Children by Alan Bain & Mark E. Weston as part of my personal growth plan. Click below for summaries of previous chapters
Chapter 1: Education & Technology
Chapter 4: Transforming Districts
Chapter 5: Associations and Edge Technology
Chapter 7: The Role of Industry
Chapter 8: Stakeholders Connected
The book closed with a look at how changes in how educators think (a paradigm shift) could lead us to creating what the authors refer to as a Type-B model of education. One quote in particular stood out for me:
“In a self-organizing system, change emerges bottom-up and control is dispersed, and leaders – with their helicopter perspective – prompt change.” (page 189)
What this reminded me of was the fourth scenario in The Future of Schooling: Educating America in 2020. In this scenario, change came about almost organically as communities, parents, museums, and a variety of other interested stakeholders began using the plethora of online resources available to create their own “unschool.” While only a few students were engaged in this sort of learning experience by 2020, indications were that this was where education was headed. (For a synopsis of each of McREL’s four scenarios, you can listen to “What Does the Future Hold for Education?” a brief podcast located here.)
I want to thank the authors for allowing me to read and reflect publicly on my blog. The Learning Edge has interesting perspectives on how to change education. Definitely check it out!
The Learning Edge by Bain & Weston (Summary 7 of 8)
I am currently reading The Learning Edge: What Technology Can Do to Educate All Children by Alan Bain & Mark E. Weston as part of my personal growth plan. Click below for summaries of previous chapters
Chapter 1: Education & Technology
Chapter 4: Transforming Districts
Chapter 5: Associations and Edge Technology
Chapter 7: The Role of Industry
I admit…I had to take a step back from reading after this chapter. Perhaps because I AM in “the industry,” I was more critical of this chapter than in previous ones. Some of the issues in education that the authors say the industry dismisses happen to be the very topics that my organization discusses every day.
Two points that most captured my attention were:
1. When talking about education’s resistance to innovation (which I concur is a problem), the authors quote, “This fact is apparent in the field’s general ambivalence (Fullan, 2007) about so many students dropping out of school, scoring poorly on tests, and being unprepared for the world of work.” (page 160)
2. On the same page, the authors offer that the field (of education) is “uninformed by research.”
While I think we have many issues that educators are trying to solve with varying degrees of success, I must disagree that educators – be they teachers, principals, superintendents, school board members, or consultants – are ambivalent about dropout rates, test scores, or preparing students for their future. (Indeed, I more often see evidence that we are hyper-focused on test scores.)
I also disagree that education is uninformed by research. The very reason my organization is often sought by clients is because of our research base. I agree that there is conflicting and, in some cases, a lack of research, but I wouldn’t go so far to call it uninformed.
Interestingly, the Summary at the end of the chapter worded the problem of “research” in a way that I find more agreeable:
“The field of education’s lack of consensus about research-informed practice makes it difficult for the ICT industry to build responsive and scalable business models to benefit education.” (page 184)
Slow Hunches and Weak Signals
Chapter Three: The Slow Hunch of Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From started with a sobering look at clues and indicators we had that could have led authorities to stopping 9/11, but several human tendencies and lack of modern tools (or at least the lack of using them) resulted in the events that are now our history on that fateful day.
As I read this chapter, I kept thinking of its similarity to the concept of “weak signals” that we use in our futures work and scenario planning. The idea is that, with 20/20 hindsight, we are often incredulous that we didn’t anticipate a monumental change or trend that was about to happen given the multitude of small, weak indicators that pointed in the future’s direction. The trick in futures studies, of course, is to teach yourself to not dismiss seemingly insignificant changes in data, trends, growth, or decline as these often are small waves preceding a huge change.
Johnson told two anecdotes in this chapter that showed how some of our greatest minds (Darwin, Locke) counteracted the tendency to ignore weak signals by writing everything down (Italics are my own) in a “commonplace book.” He also described Locke’s elaborate method of indexing his entries so that he could find and aggregate ideas later. I couldn’t help but to draw similarities between Locke’s Industrial Age method and the tools we have now that allow us to blog, Tweet, and tag information for future study.
How is your organization capturing, storing, and tagging current weak signals? Are you able to discern trends and slow hunches that can point you in the right direction for the future?
Making ideas flow
I just finished Chapter 2: Liquid Networks of Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From. In this chapter, he likens environments to the three states of matter for water. In environments that are too chaotic (like a gas) or too rigid (like ice), people have a difficult time connecting, brainstorming, and maintaining focus on the subject at hand. A perfect environment is more like water, where there is flexibility to exchange ideas while zeroing in on a primary focus.
My favorite quotes come from when Johnson is describing a study done in 1964 by Arthur Koestler, looking at the conditions that were present when scientists made the most breakthroughs:
“…most important ideas emerged during regular lab meetings, where a dozen or so researchers would gather and informally present and discuss their latest work.” (Location 704)
“…the ground zero of innovation was not the microscope. It was the conference table.” (Location 706)
While we have many meeting rooms, common areas, and even a dedicated “collaboration room” in our workplace, I think our biggest challenge to creating this type of working environment is the fact that, especially within my department, many of us are on the road for weeks at a time. While those weeks are energizing, fast-paced days when we are on site with educators, there is a tendency to feel very isolated after the day sitting alone in your hotel room. Times when we come together in our office building often must be planned months in advance. My question for my current work:
How do we create “Liquid Networks” so that even though we are physically isolated, we have a place for informal conversations where we can bounce ideas off of one another? We certainly have the technology (Google Hangout, Skype, Facebook, Twitter), but how do we create this virtual space without people feeling obligated to log in after a long day’s work?
Other folks who travel or often who work away from your building…do you have ideas that have worked?
My new vocabulary terms: Adjacent Possible and the (scholarly) Multiple
If you read this blog, you know that I am in the process of reading Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson. I finished Chapter 1: The Adjacent Possible yesterday and found so many good quotes and ideas in this chapter…and two new vocabulary terms for me.
The premise of the chapter is that organisms, communities, and ideas are generally able to only push themselves so far out of current boundaries. This idea that we have opportunities (and limitations) by concepts adjacent to current realities is fascinating to me. The author describes many examples of this phenomenon. (One example being that YouTube could not have been possible had it been conceptualized ten years earlier. The technology and the general public’s desire for sharing video on that level weren’t ready yet).
It was as I was reading about the scientific concept of multiples that I really got excited, as it’s a concept that I have explored before, but for which I did not have word. Many years ago, I started writing a novel that centered around an idea that one small group of humans had evolved missing (and therefore compensating for) a key physical characteristic of their species. I never completed the novel, but one of my main characters was an embittered, washed-up scientist who had missed fame and fortune by only a few weeks as another scientist went public with nearly the very same invention. The fact that two scientists were working on nearly identical inventions at the same time living thousands of miles apart is not an unusual phenomenon. Johnson gives several examples of this occurrence and refers to the phenomenon as “the multiple.” I love this quote:
“…just about every essential technological advance of modern life has a multiple lurking somewhere in its origin story.” (Location 396)
These concepts pose two big questions for me regarding my current work:
- What are the adjacent possibles that could move our work to the next step and expand boundaries we have not yet considered?
- Assuming that the concept of a “multiple” is correct, how can we move our ideas forward more quickly so that we are leaders of these new concepts…not “me toos.”
Where Good Ideas Come From (Intro)
In spite of a heavy travel schedule this spring, I am managing to really get into Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson. I started the book sometime ago, but am now making a dedicated effort to finishing it.
In the Introduction, the author gives fascinating anecdotes of how ideas tend to percolate before coming to fruition…sometimes for decades at a time. He also highlights the premise of his book: that ideas benefit from being able to connect with other people’s ideas, far more so than when these new ideas are “protected.” Two quotes especially resonated with me:
“A city that was ten times larger than its neighbor wasn’t ten times more innovative; it was seventeen times more innovative. A metropolis fifty times bigger than a town was 130 times more innovative.” (Location 140)
“West’s power laws suggested something far more provocative: that despite all the noise and crowding and distraction, the average resident of a metropolis with a population of five million people was almost three times more creative than the average resident of a town of a hundred thousand.” (Location 145)
I grew up in a rather small, isolated town and remember the frustration and hopelessness I would sometimes feel when I would hear about an incredible new science discovery or see a scene in a movie that looked nothing like the world I inhabited. I would hear the stories of how new, young musicians would meet each other by happenstance “downtown” in a city and suddenly a new genre of music would be created. I tried to picture these amazing, life-changing events happening in my own town and knew intuitively that they likely would not. Moving to a city in my mid-20s provided almost endless possibilities for any of my interests. Though I didn’t know a soul, I felt very much at home.
This book is also reminding me that I need to read Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier by Edward L. Glaeser. Yet another for the list!
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